Okay this prompted me to write a long reply with comments on like half the steps...nitpicking really. But I'll save them all for my own facebook or myspace page... To get right to the heart of it, the flaw is here:

"Only in a universe governed by God can universal, immaterial, unchanging laws exist. Only in a universe governed by God can rational thinking be possible. We use rational thinking to prove things. Therefore..."

Unlike all the times before, he never asked us is we agreed with this syllogism. Obviously we don't, (that's basically the nature of us being atheists). So if we don't believe the premise, thus we are not forced to accept the "logical" conclusion.

Ah. But if you don't believe in absolute moral laws, then you must think it's alright to molest children for fun.

Checkmate.

I don't see how it necessarily follows that you have to think it is OK to molest children for fun if you don't believe that there are moral laws.

What we know is that nature pretty much doesn't give a damn whether children are getting molested or not; the rational reason why we don't think it is OK to do it is that it often results in the development of persons with various psychological pathologies, which in turn is a problem for the rest of us, for the rest of these people's lives.

BTW, some rational thinking also tells us that the other extreme (preventing children from learning about sexuality for as long as possible) is also very bad, for them, and for society as a whole, but this is what we consider "moral" in our culture.

The bottom line is that what is "moral" and what is rational are often very different things, and nature doesn't care at all about the former. A consequence of that is that many things we consider "moral laws" in our culture are actually detrimental to our survival as a species (like the idea that it is immoral to use coercive methods to control population, for example). Then the question is do we stick to the "moral laws" that have no meaning or do we act rationally when we have to?

That's why religion is a lot more harmful than many people think and it is not just a question of science education and freedom from belief - because religion inhibits rational thinking, at our own peril

I think they forgot the possibility that abstract entities don't exist, period. I think they also forgot that if abstract entities exist, that doesn't mean God exists. I think they also forgot that "exist" can have more than one meaning.

What we know is that nature pretty much doesn't give a damn whether children are getting molested or not; the rational reason why we don't think it is OK to do it is that it often results in the development of persons with various psychological pathologies, which in turn is a problem for the rest of us, for the rest of these people's lives.

BTW, some rational thinking also tells us that the other extreme (preventing children from learning about sexuality for as long as possible) is also very bad, for them, and for society as a whole, but this is what we consider "moral" in our culture.

These two things are connected. Children without proper education about sexuality are far less likely to alert an adult who will do something about the problem. Thus the molestation continues for much longer.

It boxes you in with he very first question about absolute truth. Truth always exists within a context, such as a universe or a mind. There may be universes where physical laws are quite different. So which laws are "truth"? It makes no allowance for modal reasoning, or any other reasoning except for it's own narrow focus.

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Principles of Biochemistry 5th edition

Disclaimer

Some readers of this blog may be under the impression that my personal opinions represent the official position of Canada, the Province of Ontario, the City of Toronto, the University of Toronto, the Faculty of Medicine, or the Department of Biochemistry. All of these institutions, plus every single one of my colleagues, students, friends, and relatives, want you to know that I do not speak for them. You should also know that they don't speak for me.

Superstition

Quotations

The old argument of design in nature, as given by Paley, which formerlyseemed to me to be so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows.

Charles Darwin (c1880)Although I am fully convinced of the truth of the views given in this volume, I by no means expect to convince experienced naturalists whose minds are stocked with a multitude of facts all viewed, during a long course of years, from a point of view directly opposite to mine. It is so easy to hide our ignorance under such expressions as "plan of creation," "unity of design," etc., and to think that we give an explanation when we only restate a fact. Any one whose disposition leads him to attach more weight to unexplained difficulties than to the explanation of a certain number of facts will certainly reject the theory.

Charles Darwin (1859)Science reveals where religion conceals. Where religion purports to explain, it actually resorts to tautology. To assert that "God did it" is no more than an admission of ignorance dressed deceitfully as an explanation...

Quotations

I have championed contingency, and will continue to do so, because its large realm and legitimate claims have been so poorly attended by evolutionary scientists who cannot discern the beat of this different drummer while their brains and ears remain tuned to only the sounds of general theory.

The essence of Darwinism lies in its claim that natural selection creates the fit. Variation is ubiquitous and random in direction. It supplies raw material only. Natural selection directs the course of evolutionary change.

Rudyard Kipling asked how the leopard got its spots, the rhino its wrinkled skin. He called his answers "just-so stories." When evolutionists try to explain form and behavior, they also tell just-so stories—and the agent is natural selection. Virtuosity in invention replaces testability as the criterion for acceptance.

The first commandment for all versions of NOMA might be summarized by stating: "Thou shalt not mix the magisteria by claiming that God directly ordains important events in the history of nature by special interference knowable only through revelation and not accessible to science." In common parlance, we refer to such special interference as "miracle"—operationally defined as a unique and temporary suspension of natural law to reorder the facts of nature by divine fiat.

Quotations

My own view is that conclusions about the evolution of human behavior should be based on research at least as rigorous as that used in studying nonhuman animals. And if you read the animal behavior journals, you'll see that this requirement sets the bar pretty high, so that many assertions about evolutionary psychology sink without a trace.

Jerry Coyne
Why Evolution Is TrueI once made the remark that two things disappeared in 1990: one was communism, the other was biochemistry and that only one of them should be allowed to come back.

Sydney Brenner
TIBS Dec. 2000
It is naïve to think that if a species' environment changes the species must adapt or else become extinct.... Just as a changed environment need not set in motion selection for new adaptations, new adaptations may evolve in an unchanging environment if new mutations arise that are superior to any pre-existing variations

Douglas Futuyma
One of the most frightening things in the Western world, and in this country in particular, is the number of people who believe in things that are scientifically false. If someone tells me that the earth is less than 10,000 years old, in my opinion he should see a psychiatrist.

Francis Crick
There will be no difficulty in computers being adapted to biology. There will be luddites. But they will be buried.

Sydney Brenner
An atheist before Darwin could have said, following Hume: 'I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn't a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one.' I can't help feeling that such a position, though logically sound, would have left one feeling pretty unsatisfied, and that although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist

Richard Dawkins
Another curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understand it. I mean philosophers, social scientists, and so on. While in fact very few people understand it, actually as it stands, even as it stood when Darwin expressed it, and even less as we now may be able to understand it in biology.

Jacques Monod
The false view of evolution as a process of global optimizing has been applied literally by engineers who, taken in by a mistaken metaphor, have attempted to find globally optimal solutions to design problems by writing programs that model evolution by natural selection.